324
NOTES AND QUERIES. pa s. i. APRIL 2-2, me.
Mr. Hart, however, does not even notice
ithe suggestion made by Mr. Quick which
he borrowed, so he tells us, from Mr.
Lupton in his edition of Richard Mul-
'caster's ' Positions,' that Shakspere may
ihave modelled Holofernes on the first
Head Master of Merchant Taylors'.
Jn his Appendix (p. 304) Mr. Quick urges three scraps of evidence : Armado' s speech ia Act V. sc. ii., which is alleged to contain an echo of a favourite phrase of Mulcaster ; the fact that Shakspere despised school- masters; and lastly the hypothesis that Shakspere regarded Mulcaster as a " typical schoolmaster," and also, which is reckoned to have edged his malice, as a professional rival, since Mulcaster admittedly emphasized the importance of training his pupils to present dramas, and not seldom had the privilege of producing his scholars in stage plays before the Queen.
A slenderer case surely could hardly exist. Mulcaster was a unique and original, by no means a " typical," schoolmaster ; -a scholar of no small repute, declared by a -co-temporary to be " one of the best Hebrew scholars of his age" (and Hebrew scholars were not common in England in the sixteenth century) ; a man who valued his descent from an old landed Cumbrian family. This by no means completes the tale of his unusual merit. He was a man of rare sense, sympathy, and many-sided aptitudes; the first writer, in English, on economic topics, the first schoolmaster and educator who based pedagogic science on the study of psychology and economics, though neither of these had a name in his day, nor for many years after him ; a man so observant of social and political conditions, and so sagacious and statesmanlike in suggestion, that he demanded the " sorting of wits," so that, while individual " bent " should receive the maximum possible consideration, the capacities of the population should be equated to the community's vital needs ; and who, finally, was the author of that telling phrase, " There be many good means to live by beside the book " (chap, xxxvii.). Such a man was the very last person to be considered a " typical " schoolmaster, or to be chosen, by Shakspere of all people, to serve as original for the pedantic, vulgar, ignorant, foolish Holofernes ; or to be compared to the stock " hedge-schoolmaster " of ^ the literature of the sixteenth century. ' The Positions,' lengthy as it is, and concerned though it be with learning and education,
- is remarkable, in a literary age which
scattered quotations with a lavish hand,
for its freedom from Greek and Latin
phrases ; whereas Holofernes cannot open
his '-louth without emitting some Latin tag,
filched from one or other of the stock
mediaeval grammarians, still in use, Priscian
or Donatus ; or from Mantuanus, whose
works had become a school text.
For too many generations Mulcaster 's wisdom lay buried beneath Time's dust, and his treatise surely the most suggestive and stimulating book on education in our speech was disastrously forgotten and neg- lected. Mr. Quick, when he exhumed and published it, did weary pedagogues and the community at large a rare service ; but when we contemplate his suggestion that Shak- spere who must have known Mulcaster personally deliberately, and out of pro- fessional jealousy, pilloried him as Holo- fernes, it is difficult to decide whether he handles most hardly our greatest school- master or our greatest dramatist.
G. E. H.
PHILIP JAMES BAILEY.
BORN APRIL 22ND, 1816.
THIS year we have the two important celebrations of the tercentenary of Shake- speare's death, April 23rd, 1616, and that of Cervantes, nominally on the same day though, as every one knows, there was a difference of ten days between the Eng- lish and Spanish calendars. In the midst of the commemorations of these twin stars of glory, shedding their brilliant light through all the ages, a lesser light should not be forgotten, and Philip James Bailey should be gratefully remembered for having given us his poem ' Festus.'
In spite of some adverse criticisms, ' Festus ' at once became popular, and Mr. Edmund Gosse, in The Cornhill for the present month, tells of the warm reception an early example had in America, where the treasure was passed from hand to hand, long passages being transcribed ; in fact, pend- ing the arrival of other copies from England, the volume was lent to friends until it was quite worn out. The enthusiasm was the same among many young men here, and our late editor, Joseph Knight, was of these : he could repeat all the best passages from memory, in the same way as he could recite the whole of ' Paradise Lost.' In talking to me shortlv before his death, he said :
